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Three Cheers for Thumb Drives! (and back-ups!)

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Mainah:
Note: This post only applies to the Legacy database!

There is no need to panic over the possibility of the thumb drive failing and then losing your data.  The key is to back up every time you remove your drive from a computer. I back mine up to my computer before I take it to church.  Then before I leave the church, I back it up to the Awana computer before bringing the thumb drive home.  I also back up after any major amount of work that I do in the software.  It just makes sense. 

Using a thumb drive is only as risky as using your home computer or an external drive you haul back and forth.  It all assumes frequent, simple, back ups.  Yes, thumb drives can fail, but so can desktop hard drives. 

Since Rick recommends using the thumb drive to contain the software as one way to use it at home and at church, I'm thinking it is pretty secure....if you back it up.  That should be the rule with anything you do on any computer.  In fact, I actually back up to an external hard drive that I back my desktop to.

Also, I have a geek husband who's day job is Business Continuity Managment/Disaster Recovery Planning in the IT world.  I double checked this with him before typing its!  He told me he's had the same thumb drive for over two years....he took it to Kuwait (read sand and heat!) on a 15 month deployment and back and is still using it! He runs program's off of it all the time.  He also backs it up all the time.  He most certainly knows, it could die any time!

You just can't beat the convenience of hauling it to church in your pocket....except when you decide last minute to change clothes right before club and forget that you already tucked it in your other pocket....I did that last week!  Yikes.  No problem, I downloaded the trial version to the church computer, then applied my most recent (7 day old) church back-up.  I didn't do anything in it except use it for reference....but it was great to have that BACK-UP!  (I'd already printed off and hand carried my check in sheets to save time once I got to church.)

My two cents!

Did I mention you should always back up all of your computer files? ;)

Cheri88:
 :o Back up is also a good idea if you have a cute but curious little Puggle reach up and unplug your thumb drive!

Not that I would know from personal experience  ::)

 ;D ;D ;D

Rick Leffler:
Make sure you remove any lanyard attached to your USB flash drive while it is plugged into your PC!  Doing so will reduce your chances of someone accidentally grabbing the lanyard and inadvertantly unplugging the drive.

Mainah:
Another story of a user (me) who is just dangerous enough to know too much but not enough sometimes:

And then the week after you forget your thumb drive forcing you to use an old backup for reference....when you plug that thumb drive in (because you double checked your pocket several times before leaving the house,) make sure the computer draws from the correct file....not last weeks version, but the one you currently have on your thumb drive.  THAT happened to me last week!  My husband/commander saved the day when he reminded me about the drop down on the log in screen and pointed out that I need to make sure it is pointing to the right data file.  This night "the computer didn't know" the right path, so it tried to "make me use" last weeks data!  As soon as we chose the right path, the right drive, all of my newest info was there again.

I really do learn something new every day!

DavidCrow:

--- Quote from: Mainah on October 08, 2008, 05:02:50 PM ---There is no need to panic over the possibility of the thumb drive failing and then losing your data...Using a thumb drive is only as risky as using your home computer or an external drive you haul back and forth...Yes, thumb drives can fail, but so can desktop hard drives.
--- End quote ---
The difference between a USB (flash) drive and a HDD is that the former is measured in "writes" while the latter is measured in how long it has been powered on regardless of whether it has been written to.  Therefore, comparing the two is akin to comparing apples to oranges.  A USB drive is just a small IC, and thus has a finite number of writes before the memory address goes bad.  If you only wrote to the device once, it could potentially last forever.  However, if you wrote to it continually, it might only last a week.  Yes, they are sealed so they can potentially resist dust and even water, but again that is no indicator as to how long they will last.  A HDD, which has a MTBF in the millions of hours, could go bad without ever having anything written to it.  As long as the platters are spinning, it will eventually wear out.  Wear-leveling can help increase the life of your USB drive as it spreads the write operations out over blocks with the least number of writes rather than allowing the flash drive controller to use the same address over and over.

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